The Non-Future

In some languages, among Australian tribes and the peoples of the North, there exists a grammatical tense of "non-future." Mysticism occurs "now" and "already," while the future is far and uncertain. Miracles live in the present, which only pretends to be the future. The heroes of Vladimir Belyazin, known from "SNT" and "The Pentagram of Osoaviakhim," led by Vladimir Raevsky, see a transformed present, diverging like paths in Borges' garden. This is a world where it is not the Bolsheviks who have triumphed, but the Tolstoyans; coffee is banned as a drug. In the northern plain stands a concrete wolf, and in the quiet city waters lives the Tsar of Fish, death comes to chess players, demanding to finish an old game, while the harmonist saves humanity from the mad ideas of a terrible dwarf. Observing all this detachedly from its pedestal is the bronze Rosenthal. Perhaps what seems strange and fantastic today will become mundane reality by tomorrow. For such is the great law of writer-demigods, and similar transformations we have seen more than once…